Blue Sattai Maran says the Nivin Pauly-Anjali starrer never moves past its opening scene, even as early audience reaction to the film has been milder and more forgiving.
Ram's Yezhu Kadal Yezhu Malai hit screens this week after years in the can, and it's already split opinion straight down the middle. General audience reaction has been cautiously warm, according to Filmibeat Tamil. Critic Blue Sattai Maran's reaction was not warm at all.
In a video review, Maran said flatly that the story made no sense to him, and that it made no sense to anyone he'd spoken to about it either. His line: everyone who's seen the film seems to be interpreting it differently, each according to what they need it to mean. That's not a compliment in his book. It's a symptom.
His core complaint is structural. The film, he says, keeps circling the same two or three beats without ever actually advancing. Nivin Pauly's character has apparently been alive for 8,000 years, and everyone who lives alongside him eventually dies. Across these centuries he keeps encountering Anjali's character in different eras, falling for her each time, clashing with Soori's character, and at some point extending protection to a rat. Maran says this loop repeats through the runtime without the story going anywhere new, and a story that doesn't move, he argues, is one you can't follow.
He anticipated the pushback too. Say you didn't understand a film and the usual response is that you don't know how to watch cinema. Maran pushed back on that framing directly, listing Bhagavathar, Rajinikanth, Kamal Haasan, Vijay and Ajith films alongside Matrix, Inception and Interstellar as movies that landed fine with him. If this one alone doesn't land, he asked, whose fault is that. Not liking a film is taste, he said. Not understanding it at all is a different problem, and it's not the audience's to own.
Ram is among Tamil cinema's more distinctive directors, and this project had been sitting finished for a while before finally making it to theatres. The cast includes Nivin Pauly, Anjali and Soori, with Yuvan Shankar Raja on music. The film released worldwide on October 1, and Dulquer Salmaan's Wayfarer Films is handling its Kerala distribution, a detail that's given the release extra attention in Malayalam cinema circles given Nivin Pauly's home turf.
What happens next depends on which version of the audience wins out, the one giving it a pass or the one nodding along with Maran. Early online reaction threads suggest the argument over whether the film's time-loop structure is ambitious or just incoherent is far from settled. Box office numbers over the opening weekend should start answering that question either way.
Be the first to comment
Join the argument. No password, just your email or a passkey.